New PolarFire FPGAs Deliver 500K Logic Elements, 12.7G Transceivers at Up to 50 Percent Lower Power Than Competing Mid-Range FPGAs

ALISO VIEJO, Calif., Feb. 14, 2017 -- Microsemi Corporation (Nasdaq: MSCC), a leading provider of semiconductor solutions differentiated by power, security, reliability and performance, today announced the availability of its new cost-optimized PolarFire™ field programmable gate array (FPGA) product family, delivering the industry's lowest power at mid-range densities with 12.7 Gbps Serializer/Deserializer (SerDes) transceivers as well as best-in-class security and reliability. The FPGA product family is ideal for a wide range of applications within wireline access networks and cellular infrastructure, defense and commercial aviation markets, as well as industry 4.0 which includes the industrial automation and Internet of Things (IoT) markets.

"Our new FPGA product family transforms the way the market thinks about traditional mid-range FPGAs," said Bruce Weyer, vice president and business unit manager at Microsemi. "For the first time a non-volatile FPGA, with all its known benefits, provides tangible power and cost benefits over SRAM FPGAs that feature 10 Gpbs transceivers—thus delivering the differentiation necessary to cater to our customers' ever-evolving requirements and simultaneously filling a void in the market."

Microsemi's PolarFire FPGAs enable the company to increase its FPGA addressable market to over $2.5 billion covering both the low end and mid-range FPGA market segments. In addition, the innovative features of the new product family support Microsemi's continued growth within the communications infrastructure market.

Today's cellular infrastructure and wireline access networks are facing a rapid transformation, having to deliver terabytes of high value content to consumers while reducing operational and capital expenditure spend, as well as reducing their thermal and carbon footprint. Microsemi's PolarFire FPGAs provide cost-effective bandwidth processing capabilities for the increasing number of converged 10 Gpbs ports with the lowest power footprint. The new FPGA product family also addresses the market's growing concerns over tangible cyber security threats as well as reliability concerns that face deep submicron SRAM-based FPGAs as they relate to single event upsets (SEUs) in their configuration memory.

Microsemi has been actively engaged with select customers in its Early Access Program, and adoption of the product family has already begun.

"In addition to developing leading-edge video compression, communication, test and measurement, networking and consumer products, A2e Technologies also supplies related intellectual property (IP) and design services to Microsemi's customer base," said Allen Vexler, CTO of A2e Technologies. "The promise of getting an FPGA from Microsemi with higher performance signal processing and input/output (I/O) capabilities at very low power consumption changes the way we think about developing streaming video products for surveillance, drones and DVRs―and it opens up a whole range of new possibilities."

Key Features & Benefits In collaboration with Silicon Creations, Microsemi has developed a 12.7 Gbps transceiver fully optimized to be area efficient and low power, resulting in total power of less than 90 milliwatts (mWs) at 10 Gbps. With best-in-class low device static power of 25 mW at 100K logic elements (LEs), zero inrush current and unique Flash*Freeze mode for best-in-class standby power of 130 mWs at 25 degrees C, PolarFire devices are up to 50 percent lower power than competing FPGAs for the same application. Microsemi also provides customers with a power estimator to analyze power consumption of their designs. After implementation, the SmartPower Analyzer can be used to access full design power.

The FPGA family also provides the industry's best reliability with its inherent immunity to configuration SEUs. Additional features to aid with reliability include built-in single error correction and double error detection (SECDED) as well as memory interleaving on large static random access memory (LSRAMs), and system controller suspend mode for safety critical designs.

Product Availability Microsemi's PolarFire FPGA product family is shipping to early access customers now and samples for general availability will be offered in the second quarter of 2017. Orders for samples can be placed immediately. For more information, visit www.microsemi.com/polarfire or contact sales.support@microsemi.com.